Oculus, the creative team behind the Oculus Rift head-mounted virtual reality display have announced Oculus Share, a web store platform for hosting all the wild and wonderful software that developers are creating for the device. Initially the service will function purely to collate and curate the multitude of freeware tech-demo style applications that experimenting developers have been conjuring up, but plans to eventually introduce a monetisation component to function as a one-stop marketplace for people to purchase Rift-supported games and other applications.

Oculus Share (or simply, Share) is the first of many steps we’re taking to build the best virtual reality platform. With Share, you can host Oculus-ready games and experiences that you’ve created, browse and download content from other developers, rate experiences on quality and VR comfort level, provide feedback to devs on what you enjoyed (and what you didn’t), and tip fellow developers for their work in cash, should you feel so inclined.

Oculus Rift Devkit owners can access the new platform at share.oculusvr.com, using the same login details as the Oculus Developer Center.

No release target has yet been given for when Oculus plan to release a consumer version of the VR device.

What's really disappointing is that the free version of Unity was meant to be compatible with the Rift, but due to the way the licensing works, the features required to provide support are only available in the Pro version. So they provided a 4-month Pro trial to all dev-kit purchasers, except ... you can't distribute any content you produce with it!

So here are all of these hobbyists will awesome ideas for little [free] tech demos, but have limited [affordable] options for getting their ideas out there. So I'm not sure how successful this share service is going to be? (i.e. if you have the money for a Pro license ($1500), chances are you're probably going to be hosting your game on your own website, etc).

(Am yet to try UDK, but from what I understand it's heavily biased towards FPS-style gameplay (being Unreal and all), rather than being a generic platform)